On July 7th, one hundred and twenty two nations signed the first United Nations treaty banning all nuclear weapons. The treaty negotiations were led by Austria, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, and New Zealand. Only the Netherlands voted against the treaty and Singapore abstained. The U.S., Russia, Britain, China, France, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel are the countries which currently have nuclear weapons and they did not participate in the negotiations. Most members of NATO were also not involved in the negotiations. Although Japan is the only country to suffer nuclear attack, it also boycotted the treaty talks.
The President of the U.N. conference on the ban said “It’s been seven decades since the world knew the power destruction of nuclear weapons. This agreement is a very clear statement that the international community wants to move to a completely different security paradigm that does not include nuclear weapons.”
The ten-page treaty “prohibits signatories from developing, testing, manufacturing, possessing, or threatening to use nuclear weapons.” Signatories are also prohibited from giving nuclear weapons to other signatories. Now that the treaty has been approved by the U.N., it will be open for parties to sign after September 20th. At least fifty nations will have to ratify the treaty in order for it to take effect.
While the fact that one hundred and twenty two nations are agreed that all nuclear weapons should be banned, the opposition of nuclear armed nations and other powerful countries is a serious problem for implementation of the treaty. A joint statement by the U.N. ambassadors from the U.S, Britain and France made it clear that their nations had no interest in being a part of the treaty. They said that the treaty “clearly disregards the realities of the international security environment.” A major criticism of the treaty by the three ambassadors is the fact that it fails to address the problem of North Korea and its nuclear weapons program.
Instead of participating in the new treaty, the U.S., Britain and France want to strengthen the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) which discourages countries other than the original five nuclear power of U.S., Britain, France, China and Russia from embarking on their own nuclear weapons programs. In return for the support of the international community for the NPT, the five original nuclear powers say that they will continue to work for nuclear disarmament and provide nuclear technologies to other countries for the production of electricity.
Critics of the NPT say that the movement towards nuclear disarmament has been too slow. The new treaty is an explicit call for the banning of all nuclear weapons on Earth. It is hoped that it will put pressure on nuclear nations to move forward with disarmament at a faster pace. The very existence of the treaty changes the legal landscape. The director of a U.K. organization that opposes nuclear weapons said that the treaty “stops states with nuclear weapons from being able to hide behind the idea that they are not illegal.”
